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Re: Crucifiction? was( RE: torture in England (was questions) (fwd)




Poster: clevin@ripco.com (Craig Levin)

Tristan de Roquelaure:

> >However I see no medievalists discussing crucifiction as a common
> torture.  Does this mean that crucifiction died out in early period?<

Quite probably. 

> Actually, I think it was b/c of the religious ramifications of it....
> The church was, in a way, the "head" of England, and they would have viewed it as a sacrament to "crucify" someone as Christ has been.
> To them, it woudl have been imoral...

Doubtful. Other people were put to death or suffered penalties
similar to the martyrdoms of various saints (eyes being
removed=St. Lucia, for example). 

Also, sacraments are not just "anything connected with religion."
There are, at least in the Catholic canon of the time, a limited
no. of sacraments, including baptism, confirmation, marriage,
ordination (for those taking the other alternative), last rites,
confession, and communion. On occasion, the Church tried to
co-opt dubbing to knighthood, but knighthood's strong secular
self-identity saved it from that fate.

Crucifixion is a particularly nail-intensive way to go. Nails
were hard to make and expensive, and could be spent on better
things than felons. Also, a great deal of post-antique European
law derives from Germanic law, which didn't include crucifixion;
it did do other things, like getting chucked into a bog after
being choked.

> But the The question that arrises to me is that they considered the tortures "due justice", but wouldn't it have been about the same thing?

There's torture, and then there's torture, as an earlier poster
noted.

Pedro
-- 
http://pages.ripco.com:8080/~clevin/index.html 
clevin@ripco.com
Craig Levin
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